Neighborhood Joint: Yorkville Bookshop Nurtures Mind and Spirit

Lily Nass, a former preschool teacher, leads children's story time every Monday.

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

May 16, 2013

Neighborhood Joint

By SARA BECK

To readers of philosophy, “logos” means reason and rational argument. To readers of the Gospels, it is the word of God made incarnate in Jesus Christ. But for seekers of all kinds on the Upper East Side, Logos is also a cozy bookshop with a lumpy recliner and a black cat named Boo Boo, who sleeps near a stack of Bibles.

“Really, we are two shops in one,” said Harris Healy, the owner, gesturing to a display table piled with Father’s Day books on grilling and graphic novels. “We have a religious side and a secular side.”

The 826-square-foot space devotes one wall of shelves to church history, philosophy and biblical translations and commentary. Recently, a customer came in looking for 50 copies of the King James Bible, the shop’s best-selling translation.

“We had only 25 on hand, so I threw in a couple of Jewish Bibles for good measure,” said Ben Siegel, 28, an employee who runs a monthly Sacred Texts discussion group.

“I guarantee we’re the only nondenominational Christian bookstore in the world that hosts an interfaith sacred book salon led by an atheist Jew who was educated at a liberal Methodist seminary," he explained, offering a hint of his own unorthodox background.

For his part, Mr. Healy grew up an Episcopalian on the Upper East Side, where at an early age he felt the seed of a spiritual life growing.

“My headmaster at St. Bernard’s taught a little old Bible class, and I’ll never forget talking about the Book of Job,” Mr. Healy, now 56, recalled, referring to the century-old private school for boys. “I’ve never heard a more brilliant interpretation.”

Logos first opened on Madison Avenue in 1975, part of a national association of religious bookstores. Mr. Healy discovered it in 1985 after graduating from seminary, and six years later he became the managing shareholder.

“You know ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’? ” he asked, referring to the famous sermon by Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century theologian, a distant relative. “For me, the title could be ‘Publishers in the Hands of an Angry God.’ ”

In 1995, Mr. Healy moved the shop to York Avenue, and the clientele changed from commuters bound for Grand Central Terminal to locals looking for literary fiction, holiday cards — or a chat about life and faith.

Paul Summers, 57, a retired philosophy teacher from Ireland, makes a point of visiting Logos on his trips to New York. On a recent Thursday afternoon, he was browsing for a book by C. S. Lewis.

“He turns the knife in you like no one else,” Mr. Summers said. “In our culture, we have to be shocked awake.”

Others come for simpler reasons. On a blustery Monday in May, 20 toddlers settled onto the rug for weekly story time. Lily Nass, 55, tooted her kazoo and greeted her audience by name, with a puppet named Princess Francesca.

“It’s so intimate here,” said Laurie Kasloff, 41, a mother who lives around the corner. “You don’t have to get tickets or wait in line like at the library.”

Mr. Siegel entered the store as a customer himself, he said, walking into Logos eight months ago, bewitched by the draw of an independent bookshop. Within minutes he and Mr. Healy were in deep discussion about a postmodern, feminist and queer-theory critique of the Old Testament.

“Some days now I feel like a neighborhood confessor,” Mr. Siegel joked. He fiddled with his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of an Egyptian ankh, out of which peered the “Sandman” comic book character Death.

“I guess that comes with the territory,” he added. “We don’t just cater to a desire for books. We nurture the heart a little, as well as the mind.”